Wi-Fi Direct Standard, released and maintained by the Wi-Fi Alliance, is a recent advancement in the field of device to device communication in a peer-to-peer manner without requiring a centralized Access Point. By taking off the specialized hardware functionalities that a traditional AP possesses in an Infrastructure-mode IEEE 802.11 based WLAN to software, any device can be enabled with the functionality of AP. By using this basic feature, Wi-Fi Direct does away with the need for AP and empowers nodes to form a group among themselves without requiring Internet connectivity. Such peer-to-peer groups in Wi-Fi Direct are managed by a leader defined as Group Owner (GO) in the standard specification. The leader is selected by GO negotiation. Once a group is formed, the GO plays the role of traditional AP; sends out periodic beacons and routes data packets from one node to other. The current version of the standard does not address the problem of group disruption that is caused when the GO leaves a Group without getting sufficient time to inform its clients. The client nodes suffers from outage caused by absence of GO before they re-discover each other and negotiate to form a new group which takes considerable amount of time. This essentially leads to decay in throughput and increase in latency.
The problem of disruption in the service of the clients in the absence of the GO calls for a solution that will enable the clients remain seamlessly connected to each other without putting any additional responsibility on the GO. There can be a wide variety of reasons that can force a GO to leave the group which can be broadly categorized into two: (a) case of sudden link failure caused by random behavior of wireless channel, mobility, abrupt power shutdown or disaster/natural catastrophe; and (b) Selfish GO. A selfish GO is one who leaves the group to join a new group as soon as his service requirement from the group is met. In traditional Infrastructure-based Wi-Fi, Access Points are hardware that needs to be active as long as its associated clients are active. But in peer-to-peer networks like Wi-Fi Direct where the GO can be a human-intervened device like laptop computer or smart phones, the case of Selfish GO can be quite a common scenario. At the same time, it will also be unfair on the part of the GO if it is asked to continue its service of group management even though it is no longer in need of any service from the group and requires an urgent service that is not available in the current group and needs it to join another group. Devices join a peer-to-peer group when they need each other's service; if any client device is allowed to leave a group freely once its service requirement is met, then the same rule should hold for the GO as well. The original motivation behind Wi-Fi Direct being to generalize the role of the AP by enabling any device to act as GO, the next step should be to further generalize it in the way that the GO should also be allowed to leave the group anytime like any other node in the group.
There are a couple of publications in the related art to propose an exit scheme for the leaving GO without disrupting the current group. But these publications focus on cases where the GO opts to quit and chooses its successor and systematically hands over the GO-ship before leaving. For example, PTL 1 (US 2012/0278389 A1) discloses a scheme where the leaving GO asks for GO intent from multiple clients before it decides to quit and selects the most suitable node out of all the nodes who reply with an intent to become the next GO. The information about the new GO is then shared by the leaving GO before it leaves. PTL 2 (WO2013162496 A1) discloses a scheme where the leaving GO asks for intent of successorship from the group members and prepares a list of successor GOs, which may be prioritized based on credentials and shares the list with the group members before leaving.